All I'm Saying there's a joke in here somewhere

The monkey hat is courtesy of Freya's cousin, Magda. Freya rocked that monkey hat at the Milwaukee County Zoo this past week.

We made it back safe and sound from our Wisconsin trip. Our flight left Milwaukee at 6:05 this morning, so we have been up since 3:30 a.m. That's just sick and wrong. But we got home, went out to get groceries, then came back to the house and Freya and I took a nap. We're doing better now.

The trip was good over all. All Matt's siblings spent a lot of effort to spend quality time together, so we saw lots of them, which is always good. Freya took her first two steps, an act she has yet to repeat, but she's now crazy about trying to climb stairs. One of our errands this afternoon was to go buy two more baby gates--one for the day care lady and another for our big staircase. Toddlerhood is exciting!

I'm off to unpack. Were you all good? Care to share anything in particular that Santa brought you? I got 3 90-minute massages. WOO HOO! I wonder if I can get them all in one four and a half hour session? Probably not...

We're leaving for Wisconsin today, and Freya hasn't pooped in about four days. I need it to happen before 10:30, which is when we will be arriving at the airport. SEND POOPING VIBES, INTERNET! Otherwise, I know it'll happen on the plane, and that's just not going to be good at all.

So here's a hypothetical for you: say you don't have a particularly strong chin, and therefore haven't worn a turtleneck sweater in at least 10 years because of fears you'll be mistaken for an earthworm. And then say that every year, your father gets you at least one turtleneck sweater for your birthday or Christmas. And then say that this year, you got one for your birthday and two for Christmas (!). What would you do? Would you confess to your father that you never wear them and generally donate them to charity? Or would you just not say anything for fear of hurting his feelings? Totally hypothetically, of course.

Anyhoo, as I said, we're off today. I may get a chance or two to check in over the holidays. If not though, I wish you and yours a happy, safe holiday season.

Study Shows Blogging May Peak in Early 2007

Gartner analysts predict that blogging and community contributions on the Web will peak in the first half of 2007.

The researchers said that 200 million people already have given up blogging and that the total number of bloggers will peak at around 100 million.

I wonder about this. The article goes on to talk about spam blogs, or "splogs" having an impact on the totals. I'm all about whatever gets rid of those, that's all I know.

But what makes me ponder is how a lot of blogs I used to read have fallen silent. I haven't heard anything from Sherri in months...other folks are slowing down with their posts. I admit it seems pretty tempting sometimes to take a nice hiatus, but I also realize this is something of a record of and for Freya--I want her to be able to look at my writing someday and get a feeling for who her mother really is, beyond "Mom."

What have you readers noticed? Have favorites of yours gone by the wayside? What would it take for you to quit blogging?

I suppose my few posts about what I don't like about Christmas have likely given rise to people wondering (and I quote), "What bit you in the butt?" Well, if you must know...

Every second year we go see Matt's family in Wisconsin at Christmas. They're super folks and I love them, but there is something about traveling at the holidays that freaks me the hell out. Whether you fly or drive, danger abounds. It could be slick roads, it could be crowded airports where someone might bump in to me (a dread of mine...don't know why). Bottom line is that I'm not home in my comfort zone.

And really, for those of you who are married, can you truly count a trip to see your in-laws as a real vacation? I define vacation as somewhere warm and sunny with interesting scenery, where you get to relax and have people wait on you hand and foot. That's not really Wisconsin.

But it'll be a good trip. I hope.

Note: We do have a house-sitter. A big one. With a gun.

Freya got her first haircut last night. In a word (three), she hated it. I guess that's normal, but I didn't really know that last night. You'd have thought it was the Apocalypse. She literally screamed louder and longer than she did when she got four immunizations at the pediatrician a few months ago. Hated. It.

But her bangs were getting long and the back of her head was getting snarls from the length, the curls, and the split ends. We wanted her to be spruced up for seeing the family in Wisconsin last week. So we went to my dad's fiancee's house, as she cuts hair. It's a good thing we're practically kin; we probably wouldn't have been invited back otherwise. And my gosh, she looks so different--more mature, more like a kid.

We swept up all the little hairs and put 'em in an envelope to save. My baby's first haircut!

Just this last weekend, CBS Sunday Morning did a story on what is probably my favorite website (unless I think of another), WikiPedia.

You've been to the site, right? It is kind of a community knowledge repository; an online encyclopedia. It is responsible for at least 1/3 of the reasons my bosses think I am a genius. One of them said to me on Friday, "Hey, can you get me some information about a plane that crashed in Chicago in 1979? That's all I really know off the top of my head, but I want to read about the investigation." He thought it would take a long time. But no, within about two minutes, I had sent him a link to American Airlines Flight 191, courtesy of Wikipedia.

Anyway, I've been a huge fan of CBS Sunday Morning since I was a little kid. My dad watched it as my mom and little brother and I were getting ready for church. Sometimes I'd procrastinate (a sign of things to come) and sit and watch with him until I really had to move my butt to go pretend to study The Watchtower.

So I was pleased to watch the piece on the site last Sunday. It talked about the good stuff (much) and the bad stuff (some) about the site. And I was also pleased to see part of a segment from another media favorite of mine that I had missed on his regular show:

It became so popular that not long ago Comedy Central's Steven Colbert bestowed his critique.

"I'm going to log on to Wikipedia here and I am going to change it," he said on one of his shows. "You see, any user can change any entry. And if enough other users agree with them, it becomes true."

My dad, who is 71 years old, got hit by a car last week. I about shit a brick. He was standing at a street corner and got the Walk light, but saw a woman in a car to his left about to turn right through the crosswalk. He wanted to make sure she saw him before he started to cross, so he waited several seconds for her to turn her head his direction. She did, he thought they made eye contact and he waved at her, then started to walk. And then she turned into the street and hit him. She was going slowly; all it did was knock him over. But he fell on his bad elbow, which is now swollen up and hurting a lot. I asked him if he'd got her insurance information, and he said, "No, I wasn't really hurt very bad and she was so scared that I could see she felt just awful..." Well she sure as hell SHOULD feel awful, don't you think? She hit an old man with her car! I'm just pissed about the whole thing. Relieved he's okay, but what if he hadn't been? Jeez.

In lighter news, Matt and I went to my work holiday party last night. It was so fun. We got all dolled up in our finest--no one at work has ever seen me in anything resembling a dress or a skirt before--and dined, drank and danced. One of the security guards tried to tell me a joke about how he was getting ready for the party and ended up getting his Viagra and his Rogaine mixed up, and it made his hair stand straight up. I said, "I shudder to think what effect the Rogaine had."

Before the party, we took Freya to the Boise Zoo. This was the first time she's been there that we knew she was really seeing the animals, and she got pretty excited. She especially liked the penguins.

Dear Little One,

Oh, the joys of mobility! You're crawling a little bit on all fours, but your best method of locomotion is the tripod crawl, where you're on both hands, one knee, and the other leg is more or less straight and propels you along. You're also doing the wall walk and going around corners, which means you can leave the room without my knowing it unless I keep an eagle eye on you. You're now making a few words, like Da, Dad, Daddy, Dog (sounds like "doosh") and Tess. I'm honestly okay that you haven't said Mommy yet, because I know Mommy is more a state of mind for you than it is a word.

Earlier this month, we attended a function at my workplace that included dancing and drumming by Native Americans. The dancers wore traditional garb, and some of the women were called “jingle dancers” because their outfits had bells and small plates of metal sewn on them in order to make a lively noise as they moved. The young man who danced had ribbons and lengths of fringe along his arms and legs, and as he danced and spun, it swirled around him in rainbows. Four men sat at a drum that they beat on and they sang their songs as the dancers circled around.

Your little arms waved up and down in time to the music and you stood in my lap and bounced up and down. As the dancers passed by us, your hand went to your mouth for a moment like you were amazed, and then you went back to waving your arms. Your voice joined that of the drummers. I noticed that quite a few people in the audience, and even some of the dancers, were watching the little girl in my lap nearly as much as they watched the rest of the show.

The final dance was called the Friendship Dance, and anyone in the audience was invited to participate. I’ve been to pow-wows before and have always sat on the sidelines during these dances, despite the fact that I longed to go out and join the rest of the dancers. I wasn’t brave enough to stand up. But you had been dancing already as you stood in my lap and you’d raised your voice in singing. Following your example, I stood up with you in my arms and we joined the dance. We side-stepped in a large circle next to coworkers and dancers, and the circle wrapped in on itself in a spiral with the dancers in front shaking the hands of the dancers behind in a show of friendship. Hands reached out to us—hands of the Native children who danced, hands of their parents, and the old and gnarled hand of the tribal elder in a full headdress.

You reached out, and your simple joy and lack of hesitation inspired me to reach out too. You don’t yet know how to walk, but you know how to dance.

I love you,

Mommy

One quick thing I love about Christmas: the way that good things come from people. Our office had a Giving Tree this year, and virtually all the tags got snapped up. People bought some awesome toys, from what I was able to see under the tree today when I dropped our donations off. I love thinking about how little kids who might not have had a very good Christmas will be overjoyed with their wishes being fulfilled. That is a beautiful, beautiful thing to me.

More tomorrow--I've got the 10 month letter to Freya cooked up, but it's on the other, unplugged computer and I just don't have the energy at the moment. Happy 10-Month Birthday, baby bug!

Thanks to Erica for reminding me of another thing I really don't like about Christmas: stupid TV specials.

And you'd better tune up your keyboards to send me some special hate mail, because guess which two I hate the most? Rudolph and Charlie Brown! That's right, I think they're just awful. The characters in Rudolph are just plain scary looking, and I can't abide the Vince Garibaldi music in the Charlie Brown special. I think Charlie Brown is just an insipid dope; a doormat, even. Maybe that makes me a Lucy, I don't know for sure.

Perhaps a lot of this is tied to the fact that I wasn't allowed to watch Christmas specials when I was growing up...that whole Jehovah's Witness thing. If I had watched any of that, my little blonde head probably would have exploded from the idolatry and false gods worshipped by that round-headed kid and all his pals. So maybe that'll cut me a little slack with some of you. If not...BAH HUMBUG!

And because I promised to include things about Christmas that I really do like, I'm going to throw in that I know almost all of the lines in The Christmas Story, and I love How the Grinch Stole Christmas. And because I didn't mention it last night, my favorite Christmas songs are "I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas," and "White Christmas," as performed by The Drifters.

I think I'll write a little series about things that make me go "Bah, humbug!" Prepare for much cantankerous-ness...osity.

You know one thing I don't like about Christmas? Mannheim Steamroller. They're that OHHHH SO DRAMATIC group making jazzed up holiday music. Essentially they take a good Christmas carol, turn it into Muzak, then try to make it cool. And it ends up sucking real, real hard.

The song of theirs that you've probably heard is "Christmas Eve Sarajevo." Oh, crap...guess what? I just Googled the title of the song to make sure I had it right, and guess what? That's not Mannheim Steamroller, it's the Trans-Siberian Orchestra. Oops.

Okay, tune in later this week for my next episode of TIDLAC, "I Hate the Trans-Siberian Orchestra."

Bah, humbug!

A girlfriend and I went to the mall (Freya in tow, of course) on Saturday to get some accessories for our holiday party. It's the first time I have been to a mall between Thanksgiving and Christmas for years.

And you know, it really wasn't that bad. I didn't have to shove anyone or even look bigger than normal in an attempt to ward people out of my space. There was one oddball hippie lady who ogled over Freya for quite a while, but I figured she was pretty benign.

And o! the bargains! I saw something in the news saying retailers are hurting this holiday season (but don't they say that every year?), and virtually everything we took to the registers ended up being "further discounted." Okay by me.

So I bought some black witch boots to wear to the holiday party with my long black dress. Whaddya think?

Okay, seriously? When, as a parent, do you finally start getting more rest? Is it once they're out of the toddler years--like around four or five years old? Or is it later than that? I'd really like to have a goal. A point on the horizon, however distant, would be great.

Freya is still doing pretty much her usual night-time schtick: she cosleeps and nurses through the night. We go to bed around 8:00, she falls asleep and I read until 9:00 or so. Then we're up at 6:00 on the weekdays and maybe 7-7:30 on the weekends. And there are a couple of naps. So she's getting what she needs and I should be.

But this last week was a killer. We all had head colds, she cut that fourth tooth (finally) and started crawling, I had a very high-performance-required work week, a plugged duct in my breast and the bottom line is that I was going balls-out and running on energy reserves.

I'm feeling pretty damned ragged at the moment, thank you. So when am I going to catch up? 2010-ish?